[CPAP] Insurance and DME vs online purchase

[Phil7]

I'm still using a prescription an MD wrote me 11 years ago, and 6 months before he retired.   The online vendor I use always insists it's a lifetime prescription.   I gave up getting medical insurance reimbursement for anything CPAP related though.  It's painful trying that alone.   

The online CPAP supplier I use has insisted (for years) that the prescription I have is a "lifetime" prescription.    I'm paying a lot extra out of pocket that insurance might pick up, but I also feel happily liberated from what I viewed as a giant scam industry.  

There also aren't any records anywhere and I disconnected the modem form my Air Sense 10.   I'm not at risk for getting into anything like a car accidental or lawsuite where a lawyer might get their hands on sleep data or sleep apnea medical records.   At some point, someone is going to get screwed over from their collected sleep data (either by a lawyer or a data breach).

[S. Manz]

I know I'm late to the party here but I would Just buy my own machine and don't willingly become enslaved to my insurance company and DME scams.

[Horseshoez]

I'm in a similar boat; I got my first, and so far only CPAP back in 2007, and haven't thought much about it since. This year I changed jobs; the new gig will see me on the road up to 26 weeks per year (once travel restrictions are eased), and after taking a dozen trips in 2019 with my 2007 vintage machine, I decided to see if any developments in PAP technology over the last 14 years might have come up with wo reduce the size of the devices. Yeah, I know y'all reading this are getting a bit of a chuckle out of this, but I was delighted to see some of the new PAP machines designed for travel; so delighted I called my insurance company and they said, "Sorry, we don't pay for travel PAP machines." Okay, back to square one, sort of...

My insurance company back in 2007 arranged for me to use a DME which was both incompetent and had borderline criminally fraudulent business practices; I had to threaten them with legal action to get them to leave me alone; no way I was going to reopen that chapter. As I didn't have a copy of my original prescription I called the ENT I'd gone to back in 2007 and scheduled an appointment; the PA I worked with back then was still there, he remembered me, and after a quick interview, a look up my nose and down my throat, and he wrote me a new prescription on the spot. He did say if I was inclined to have my insurance company pay for the new device, I'd probably need to do another sleep evaluation, but since I'm just going to pay for mine myself, I'll be good to go.